A real eye opener for someone brought up on the GPL Spa - it looks much more like the road I drove last month though I reckon Eau Rouge is a lot steeper - but I think the mirage effect is way over the top and I smell BS - it is an artifact really It reminds me of the gormless blurring in NFS, or further back, the bizarre trails behind the golf ball in Links.

And did everybody who lived around the circuit really park their cars alongside the track like that? I guess I should go and check some videos...

Thank you, but it's not BS--the mirage is tied into the road shader's reflection elements. It is over the top becuase it's not tied to any controlling elements yet, such as temperature, sun angle, etc--right now it's just turned on full. And yes, at race time they parked just about anywhere there was a place to park... Crazy...

To be on-topic: I would like to see better shaders on objects rather than haze effect. Even if interesting, correct shading are more important for how real will scene look.
But as far as I know we have to wait for release more than just a couple of months, so maybe in final version we will get everything we want.

There doesn't look to be that much difference, not sure why, I might have rendered the video with in correct settings. I'll check next time.

Even with 720p the video quality is bad. When the video is paused it looks weird somehow as if there are blurred silhouttes for all the edges. Are you sure the video was captured at 29,97 fps? There are lots of tutorials on the internet how to get the maximum quality for youtube videos... I do like all the updates on the rf2 development but sometimes the presentation looks quite unprofessional.

This is where we disagree. Although your point IS valid, I believe the overall realism of the scene is more important than any one particular element considering that 90% of the time you are racing by things at over 150 mph. So, in my mind, if I have to sacrifice one particular element so that the entire view will look better then I'll do it.

Now, that said, we are still doing a lot of tweaking, so it may be that what you feel may be lacking in an object's shading may be addressed just by that. I
can also tell you that our preliminary tests with HDR look quite stunning--it's hard to believe the difference it makes really...